![]() ![]() ![]() The film is pleasingly thorny on the subject of intimacy, sexual dysfunction and trauma. Each hurdle is treated as an opportunity for further intimacy, but it’s a case of one step forwards, two steps back as the couple inch closer to the act of sex. The first sentence of Ian McEwan 's 2007 novella On Chesil Beach establishes the tone: 'They were young, educated, and both virgins on this, their wedding night, and they lived in a time when a conversation about sexual difficulties was plainly impossible.' It's author as social anthropologist. The film’s courtship scenes are convincingly sweet and ripe with teenage awkwardness, so it’s a tragic surprise when the newlyweds struggle, repeatedly, over the course of that evening to consummate their marriage. As a series of intervening flashbacks reveals, Florence (Saoirse Ronan, with an excellent British accent) and Edward (Billy Howle) are recent university graduates from predictably different worlds she, a classical musician from an uptight, wealthy, middle-class family, he, the provincial son of a schoolteacher and a “brain damaged” artist (Anne-Marie Duff). ![]() S hot by Steve McQueen’s regular cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, and with impeccable attention to period detail, Dominic Cooke’s handsome adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 2007 novel pivots around a fusty seaside hotel, on a young couple’s wedding night in 1962. ![]()
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